Mireille Falardeau et Michel Loranger Le choix de stratégies ... - CSSE

MEN AS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS 405
need to be hugged and . . . [males] are not going to be able to hug kids. ...I
hear it expressed as blatantly as that and [I feel] a real resentment. ...Soyou
hear one thing — [men] should be in elementary — then you hear . . . the exact
opposite — kids need to be mothered, they need things men can’t give them.
What is going on here?
Jerry: I was told by a female teacher who had been teaching 13 years that men can’t
teach primary. ...Shesaid men are not willing to run up and wipe a dirty nose
...orlaceaboot...orlocate a lost mitt. She said, “You just won’t make it
there.”
Conceptions of men as unable or unwilling to care for young children (Seifert,
1988) have more than a hint of biological determinism about them, and run
counter to the men’s conceptions of themselves.
As a Grade 1 teacher, George found that no one really believed he could be
committed to teaching young children:
One reaction I have had from male colleagues ...isthesuggestion that once I get this
year behind me I would like to “move up” . . . and I say, “Oh, no, I’m hoping I’ll be so
good they’ll keep me right here.” . . . I [told them] I had had a chance to take a higher
grade and chose this one. Then they look at [me] as if [I am] making it up.
There is maybe a bit of a sense that it’s right for the women to have the primary
grades and . . . that [I am] there for a year but [am] not really serious as a primary
teacher and so [they think], “You’ll go, and why don’t you, because you don’t really care
about primary that much.”
At the beginning of the year, George had found the primary teachers “very
supportive,” but even at the end of the year he could “still sense in the staff
room...that they are not completely used to [a man in Grade 1]”:
I get the sense that these women are trying to sweep the primary division clean — which
really bothers me because I keep thinking I have done a credible job and they are not
looking at that side of it.
I really think some of them think this has been just a flash in the pan — that the old
boy [the principal] made a mistake last year. It really hurts because I don’t want to move.
And, George thought he knew why the other primary teachers wanted him to go:
They want [the classrooms] back because that’s the way it was. ...It’stheroom, and
they want the grade. It is very specific what they are after. And they want that kitchen
centre back, too. And those slates over there. ...[Those supplies] came with the room,
but they want them back.
Indeed, Acker (1983) has suggested that female primary teachers, having carved
out an area of influence, may “[hold] on to it as one of the few arenas in which